As authors, it's sometimes easy to lose track of how accessible our writing actually is. We often assume that whatever we write, as long as it makes sense and is grammatically correct, it will be easy to follow and enjoy. Our guest this week, author Tim Franks, begs to differ. As a former teacher working with the phonics system of teaching children to read, he recognised that many books written for that audience weren't as accessible and user-friendly as they should be. He contacted the Oxford University Press and urged them to look again at the way their school text books were written and structured. The result? Tim became a consultant and author for them, specialising in phonics for the Oxford Reading Tree programme. Now Tim has retired from education, he applies the same rigour to his fiction, and revises his books to make them as readable as possible. His first novel, Day of Long Shadows was published this month - a thriller set in the underworld of Sheffield.
Also this week, why are Gen Z readers being drawn back to physical books? And we hear how one publishing house is trying to create products to allow people with dementia to experience the joy of books once more.
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